Saigon tried to assert itself without breaking with the White House. After Kissinger’s press conference, Thieu said there would be no peace in Vietnam until he signed a treaty himself.1 His foreign minister issued a statement declaring that the South would never accept a settlement that worked against its people’s “interests and aspirations”—without saying he meant the one that Kissinger had said was at hand. The New York Times tried to interpret his words but missed the mark, concluding that the “statement appeared to be designed to emphasize that the main obstacle to an accord and a ceasefire was President Nguyen Van Thieu’s doubts about what the details of the political settlement would be, not any general objection.”2 South Vietnam’s president understood the details better than anyone at the Times, since he had read the settlement.
Thieu clarified his meaning the next day at a public rally of his National Assembly: North Vietnamese withdrawal was his “minimum demand.” The Times sought further interpretation: “Informed Vietnamese and American observers here see President Thieu’s continuing public objections to a ceasefire in place more as a delaying tactic rather than an attempt to impose a veto.”3
Without South Vietnam’s president on board, Nixon let Hanoi’s October 31 signing deadline come and go. He dictated a statement to his press secretary that made a virtue of political necessity: “ ‘After a long and difficult war, we’re not going to have a hasty peace that might—that’ll lead to another war—to the resumption of the war.’ You get that line?”
“Yes, sir.”4
As the press secretary walked out of the Oval Office, in walked Kissinger with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon’s old rival come to pay tribute. “You’re still the strong man we’ve got to have,” Rockefeller told Nixon. The governor had recently had dinner with managing editor A. M. Rosenthal and others on the editorial staff of the Times, who praised Kissinger’s press conference performance. “They thought what he said was a hundred percent,” Rockefeller said. “And then they wrote a good editorial.”5 This was putting it mildly; the Times had extolled the “truly remarkable achievement for the tireless professor-turned-diplomat,” asserting that Kissinger “deserves the thanks of the nation and has certainly earned the respect of even the severest critics of the policies he has so doggedly pursued.” And the Times got editorially huffy with Saigon: “Mr. Thieu has no grounds for complaint. The proposed agreement leaves his government intact, free to work out its own arrangements with the other side under the only kind of Vietnamization that ever made sense—Vietnamization of the peace.”6
Later that day Rockefeller would tell the National Press Club that “history may well record that President Nixon has conducted the most successful four-year foreign policy of this century.”7 Kissinger gave Nixon the highlights. “In the speech he said, ‘Now on Vietnam, the president’s near success,’ ” said Kissinger. “ ‘He’s got the outlines of a peace agreement. He insists that all the details must be worked out because he doesn’t want an armistice, he wants a peace. And can we, as Americans, be proud to have such a president?’ Everybody got up and applauded.”
“Did they?”
“Yeah, and that’s the Press Club.” Nixon was in “really the best position of all now, because the Right sees you are defending the details of the agreement. I’m now getting out the word that we want troops to leave,” Kissinger said. “I triggered it with that Los Angeles Times story.” He had misled reporter Bob Toth. “I put it out a little bit diabolically,” said Kissinger. “I put it out as if we wanted all troops to leave.”
The result was on the front page: “U.S. Insists Hanoi Pull Back Troops: Requires Action on Withdrawal of 145,000 Men before Signing.” Reporters were calling the national security adviser to see if the L.A. Times story was true. “So that now when I say what we really want,” Kissinger told the president, “people think it’s moderate.”
Vietnam was “going to come out in the best possible way,” said Kissinger. It was overriding Watergate and dominating the news. It had voters focusing on “your strength, foreign policy,” Kissinger said, “and all the other crap is dogs yapping at your heels.”
“That’s right,” said the president.
“And it shows you as strong because you’re not taking the easy way out of signing—”
“I like that. I like that.”
“—just before election,” said Kissinger. “By your not signing it, I think your moral position is absolutely unassailable.” The adviser was looking past the president’s anticipated landslide reelection. “I think we ought to start moving the B-52s further north,” said Kissinger.
“Absolutely.”
“Because the only thing those sons of bitches—and then, the day after your election, we ought to start reconnaissance around Hanoi again.”
“Sure.”
“And then, if after a week they don’t answer, we ought to start bombing up there.”
“They’ll answer,” said the president. “They know that after November 7th, if they continue the war, we’ll knock the hell out of them.” He asked how Hanoi’s protest of his refusal to sign the deal by the October 31 deadline was playing in the press.
“Oh, boys will be boys,” said Kissinger. He’d been working on reporters, downplaying the angry words flowing out of both North and South Vietnam: “I said, ‘If I listened to everything that’s said now from Hanoi or Saigon, we’d go out of our mind.’ I said, ‘Thieu is going to yell, Hanoi’s going to yell.’ ” After the election, Kissinger said, they should send Hanoi “a seemingly very friendly letter saying now that you are reelected you want to reaffirm everything in the agreement. Now let’s get it finished.”
The president agreed. “I think, too, right after the election is over, we have to write Thieu a note telling him to get the hell on board here,” Nixon said.
“Well, we’ve got Thieu quieted down now,” Kissinger said.
“You really think so?”
“Yeah.”8
The front page of the next day’s New York Times suggested otherwise: “Thieu Calls Draft Accord ‘Surrender to Communists’: President, in a National Day Address, Denounces the Agreement as ‘Only a Ceasefire to Sell Out Vietnam.’ ”
It was the most public possible blowup. National Day was South Vietnam’s sorry version of Independence Day. It memorialized the November 1, 1963, overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s first cruel but ineffective anti-Communist president, by a cabal of comparably cruel and ineffective anti-Communist generals (and then-Colonel Thieu) in a coup plot that climaxed with Diem’s assassination following his surrender. Thieu chose his words carefully. Branding the settlement as a sellout and a surrender cut to the heart of Nixon’s reelection campaign. The South Vietnamese president didn’t call the election commission a coalition government, instead denouncing it as “a dictatorial three-part regime.” He focused on the key strategic fact that Nixon and Kissinger had downplayed—the continued presence of 150,000 (Thieu said 300,000 to 400,000) North Vietnamese troops in the South.9 The blowup was big: Thieu’s speech led the evening news on CBS and ABC.10
Half of the national Democratic ticket seized the moment. Just as his brother-in-law Ted Kennedy had earlier assailed Nixon’s strategy as fraudulent and failing, so now did vice presidential nominee Sargent Shriver. “I don’t see what’s the difference between what he has got and what he used to call surrender,” Shriver said on San Francisco radio the day before Thieu erupted. It was the sharpest attack any Democrat had made on the settlement. “Most Americans were under the impression we were fighting for a free and independent South Vietnam,” he said. “The total effort would be a failure if the government of Thieu fell.”11
Shriver raised an astonishingly astute question in a speech the next day before the World Affairs Council: “What would happen, I keep asking myself, if [the agreement] were signed—if in fact, after we get out of there war should break out again. Is President Nixon or Dr. Kissinger, for example, promising Hanoi that we will not renew or participate in renewed fighting?” The highly classified answer was that for over a year the White House had been secretly assuring the Communists that Nixon would not intervene as long as Hanoi waited a year or two before conquering South Vietnam.
Shriver also asked, “Is he promising Saigon that we will return to fighting if the proposed agreement breaks down?”12 Indeed, he was. The spot-on speculation continued when Shriver spoke to Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergymen in Baltimore the following day: “We might be promising Hanoi that we will not come back in and simultaneously promise Saigon that we would.”13
Not one word of this made the evening news or the front page. Despite his Kennedy cachet, Shriver drew smaller crowds than Nixon, McGovern, or even Agnew. As his staff admitted, “We’re number four.”14
McGovern’s reaction mattered much more, and he didn’t attack the settlement. He attacked Thieu and Nixon for not signing it.15 In a nationally televised address, speaking behind a lectern at First Methodist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, McGovern once again expressed his fervent doubt that Nixon would withdraw from Vietnam: “If he escapes his responsibility now, can you think he will end the war after the election, once he is free from the will of the American people?”16 Reporters found out that Shriver had spoken out against the pact without consulting the top of his ticket.17 After telling campaign audiences that the deal “won’t work,” Shriver was forced to add that McGovern wanted Nixon to sign it anyway, since it “would at least achieve United States withdrawal.”18 The Democratic message was a mixed, muddled mess.
The White House, however, wove Thieu’s blowup into the narrative it had been constructing for four years. The Times cited “American officials” who told the newspaper that “Thieu is speaking to his domestic political audience only and does not pose as serious an obstacle to the realization of an accord as his words suggest.” It was a preemptive countercharge—that Thieu’s statements (rather than Nixon and Kissinger’s) were designed merely for domestic political consumption.19 But if you believed that Nixon was the kind of man who would just not let Saigon fall to the Communists—as the presidential nominees of both parties claimed—then the counterclaim sounded more true than the truth. The Los Angeles Times editorialized that Thieu was “digging in his heels in what appears a strategy to assert a better claim to national leadership.”20 The Chicago Tribune put the same opinion in a news article on the blowup: “It was to stifle ‘internal’ opponents.”21 A Wall Street Journal article likewise took White House officials at their word: “Yet many officials here believe this is largely jockeying for improved political and propaganda positions.”22 Jockeying by Thieu, that is—not by the White House. Even things Kissinger was admitting to reporters, such as the continued postsettlement presence of North Vietnamese troops on Southern soil, sounded false when they came from Saigon. “President Thieu of South Vietnam insists, however, that the agreement allows Northern troops to remain in the South—but this cannot be taken at its face value, any more than his other claims,” wrote the columnist Victor Zorza in the Washington Post.23
It mattered little that Thieu’s domestic political adversaries, including his opponent in the bitter, rigged 1971 election, Gen. Duong Van “Big” Minh, had united with him in opposition to the deal. Big Minh said, “As a military man, I am not for a ceasefire in place.”24 He wanted both sides to withdraw to regrouping areas, as they had in 1954. Yet in this rare case where Big Minh supported Thieu, the Washington Post’s reporter perceived veiled criticism beneath the surface: “Among those who are suggesting that perhaps Thieu is holding on to a position beyond the point of reasonableness is Gen. Duong Van (Big) Minh, who issued his annual National Day statement today.”25 It was at the annual luncheon Big Minh held honoring National Day that he announced that he, like Thieu, opposed the settlement.26 When the facts don’t fit a compelling narrative, the facts suffer.